My Democracy slingshot had me in good shape, but I landed an even larger break of luck a couple of turns later when Saladin decided to get frisky and declare war on Elizabeth:
What a stroke of fortune! Saladin is never going to vote for me, since he's the Buddhist founder, and I have deliberately held off on making any deals with him to please my allies. (Sal asked me for trades quite a few times, but he was the "worst enemy" of several civs, so I couldn't agree to them.) Now I couldn't declare war on Sal myself, due to my peaceful nature, but if Liz asked me to join in her war, how could I possibly resist the overtures of my red-headed neighbor... 
Even better, look at the situation at Nottingham itself. Sal's got a winning army there! Hopefully he'll be able to take the city, which would relieve the English cultural pressure on my eastern border. (A razing would be the ideal move, but I'm not holding my breath on that.) Sure enough, Nottingham falls two turns later:
Woohoo, go Sal! There is now a city with zero cultural infrastructure sitting just outside my borders. Time for another aggressive settlement! Can you say "cultural push?" I knew you could. 
Liz isn't doing too hot in this war, is she? How long do you think before she asks me to help out?
One turn later, here comes Lizzie with hat in hand. I hope you took the "under" on that one! 
Obviously I was going to accept the offer, since that way I could pile up even more relations boost with the English. (And it was still by no means certain that I would land this vote; Liz was "Pleased" with FDR, and he had just gone to Free Religion, which is her favorite civic. Once Liz reached Liberalism, she would drop that +5 shared faith bonus with me and start accumulating pluses with FDR, eep!) I'll also point out here the absurdity of that remaining minus for "you stopped trading with us!", which took place in 310BC. Seriously, these modifiers shouldn't last FOREVER! Being penalized for a trivial event that happened in BC years makes no sense.
As I said, I was of course going to accept the offer and start adding military struggle bonuses with the English. What I was NOT expecting was the minuses that I got from Caesar and Mao when I agreed to start the war! Say what?! Mao was at -2 overall relations with Saladin, and yet he STILL got angry at me for "declaring war on his friend"? Argh! 
Did I mention it's hard to make friends with more than a couple of civs in this game?
OK, the problem here is that SOME of my friends hate Saladin (Liz) and SOME of them like Saladin (such as Caesar). I can't let that state of affairs go on! Everybody's going to have to be on the same page here. So I decided to trade away some of my outdated techs in order to rectify the situation:
Ahh, Caesar. Always willing to go to war if you throw in a tech. 
Have I mentioned that Caesar is one of my favorite civs to ally with in Civ4? He's a bad enemy, but a great friend (rarely leads the tech race, always builds lots of units, easy to sic on a rival AI). Aside from Caesar, Mao and Alex are also some of the best friends to have. Alex is CRAZY, but if you can work with him, he'll fight ANYONE for you! Cathy can be pretty good in that regard too. Anyway, by turning Caesar against Saladin I would poison their relationship and ensure that he was firmly on my side. No cracks can develop in my Hindu alliance - Liz's enemies must be everyone's enemies!
Even though I had a border with Saladin just to the east of my capital, the Arabs made no move towards me in this war. That was a good thing; I was keeping Nationhood civic in my back pocket for an emergency, but I wasn't exactly prepared to fight a war just yet. During these turns, I also got my first revolt at Awdaghost:
A lousy city, but I'll still take it! Awdaghost has been sitting on 0% Malinese culture ever since 1286AD (umm, that was over 25 turns ago...) but this was the first revolt. Now all I can do is cross my fingers and hope I'll get another one for the flip. I've got about a 5% chance for a revolt each turn, it's just a pure dice roll at this point...
Caesar took his time moving his army across my territory, but when they finally reached Saladin's borders, it was a rather impressive sight!
Aww yeah, Kufah's goin down! 
(Indeed, it was razed the next turn.) I would have liked to rush a settler down here, but the borders of Guanzhou expanded, and there was simply no place to put one. Using his own expanded borders, Mao would soon found a replacement city in about the same location. Oh well, can't get ALL the land!
Once it became clear that Saladin was not going to invade me from the east (he had plenty on his hands, between his wars with Liz and Caesar), I founded an aggressive city three tiles west of Nottingham. With a chopped theatre and forced Artist specialist, I would be able to expand my borders VERY quickly there as well. The military struggle bonus pushed Caesar over the top to "Friendly" status in 1466, woohoo! - and then he converted to Taoism in 1478. D'oh! 
I would just have to try and convince him to switch back down the road, possibly by feeding him a tech or two.
Just after 1500, I finally got tired of Mao sitting at "Cautious" relations, so I gifted him Banking and got a huge boost in relations: +4 bonus from "fair and forthright" trade! That took Mao up to "Pleased." Once we reached that milestone, he was willing to go to war alongside my Egyptians, and I figured I'd better direct his aggression at Sal before he got ideas of coming after me again!
Someone once posted a while ago (sorry, can't remember who) that the best way to get Diplomatic victories is to sign the AI civs into a lot of wars. That might seem counterintuitive, but you can only get so many pluses via peaceful means alone. Joining wars, getting those mutual military numbers, and - most importantly - stirring up hate between the AIs is really the way to go. Mao was only lukewarm towards me at this point, but watch what happens to our relationship after we've shared a common enemy for a while.
Those screenshots with Mao and Caesar should also give you an indication of just how big of a tech lead I have right now. 
Here's what the world looked like in 1500AD:
It's a bit difficult to see anything there, so here's a bare map of the world from the same date:
I marked the capitals with dots to illustrate the starting positions; my favorite thing about the bare map is the ease with which you can see the borders. Clearly, I did rather well for myself in terms of grabbing land, especially in the north and in the west. Antium was actually Rome's second city, and I got it to flip to me! Mansa has seven cities, but they are very weak, and he's been squeezed badly. Liz is in worse shape, with only four cities to her name. Poor girl. Saladin looks better at the moment, with six cities, but he's already had one razed, there's another one under severe cultural pressure, and Mao/Caesar are moving large stacks into his borders now. Mao and Toku both have six cities (five on land and one offshore for each of them), but were unable to expand out of the south. Caesar has seven cities and did well in the north, but has fared poorly everywhere else. And FDR - he carved up the north and did MUCH better than any of the other AIs. That, along with the Colossus/Great Lighthouse/Pyramids combo separated him from the pack of the other civs.
In terms of this Potluck game... I think the easiest starting position is the Americans. If the FDR players push east with their early settlers, they should stand a good chance of getting most or all of the northern territory, most of which was pretty good stuff. Not to mention the fact that the Americans are Industrious and start with stone, for a guaranteed Pyramids! Rome and Egypt both have the potential for huge landgrabs, but at the tradeoff of being surrounded by rivals. On the other side of the spectrum, I think Mali, England, and Japan have the weakest starts. Mali is crushed in the tundra, England just has too many rivals on all sides, and Japan lacks land to work with. We'll see how things shake out on report day, but those last three civs will probably have the most interesting stories to tell!
Here are the relations with the civs I'm targeting in 1500AD. I'll need to pull votes from at least three of these civs to have any chance at a Diplomatic win, and probably all four to realistically get it done. Mansa is the only one who I would consider safely in my camp right now; the only troublesome sign there is that he's got very good relations with FDR as well. Liz is Friendly with me, but I've already explained why Free Religion civic may mess things up there. Caesar is running Taoism right now, which is why our relations are down a bit, but I should be able to turn that around and get him back to Friendly soon enough. Mao is still less certain, but relations are on the rise there as well. Notice that I'm sending resources to everyone, even at ridiculously cheap rates (1gpt!) just to get the supply bonus. You've got to do everything you can!
I might not have been fighting, but the war ground on in the south without me. Caesar's stack of doom was starting to peter out, but he still had force enough to capture and raze Damascus on my southern border:
Way to go Caesar! 
You know what that means: time to poach the spot!
Hieraconpolis might not look too impressive right now, but let's get a theatre and some forced Artist specialists in there, and then we'll see what happens. Also notice El-Amarna above at the top of the screen. That city is designed to flip Nottingham, and it's already pumping out culture at a good clip. If Saladin doesn't get his act together, I may be able to grab abother city on my borders.
Unfortunately, up in the north Mansa was taking steps to ensure I wouldn't get any more of his cities:
The Great Artist will end any chance of me flipping Awdaghost. 
So the net total for Awdaghost: it sat at 0% Malinese culture from 1286 to 1544, a total of 50 turns. I got one revolt in those turns, but could not get the flip. Guess the dice just didn't fall my way that time...
Finally I did see some units from Saladin, but by now I was packing rifles:
Horse archer vs. rifle = bad odds. 
Everyone else made peace with Saladin by 1559AD, so I did too. I later wondered whether it would have been better to keep the wars going, but felt it would have been too much against the spirit of the game. It appeared as though the world would return to peace for the time being. With the discovery of Scientific Method in 1562, I entered the Industrial age. Turns out I had four oil resources on hand, including one UNDER Ice Flipper, heh. I also made the permanent swap from Bureaucracy to Free Speech at this point, now that Emancipation had boosted most of my cottages into towns. That 100% increase in culture was only going to make my border cities that much more effective too!
But on the next turn, this annoucement came out of the blue and once again shook up the game:
War between FDR and Caesar! 
Wow! Big news. Also look at the left side of the screenshot above: Statue of Liberty due in 1 turn. I would get that wonder as expected in 1568. These two events were so important, they initiated a new chapter in the history of the Egyptians...
